It’s the first Saturday of the month, and so it’s Six Degrees of Separation day. To find out more about this meme, check out Books are My Favourite and Best where all will be explained.
So, the starting book is Siri Husdvedt’s What I Loved. I could have sworn that I have read this book, but I have no record of it at all, and when I read the synopsis it doesn’t sound familiar either. But I gather that it starts off with an art historian and a painting, so that leads me to….
Alex Miller’s The Sitters which is about an aging portrait painter and his young portrait subject, a visiting academic. It’s only a small book, and like much of Miller’s work, it has layers under its apparent simplicity. Talking about sitting for a portrait leads me to…..
Candace Bruce’s The Longing, which has a dual narrative: one set in the mid 19th century where a young indigenous woman working as a domestic servant in one of those large Western Districts homesteads, observes her mistress’ infatuation with a visiting portrait painter, and a second narrative where 150 years later an art historian visits the same homestead to make a significance assessment of a portrait kept by the family in their now-decayed mansion. That Western Districts of Victoria setting takes me to….
Margaret Kiddle’s Men of Yesterday: A social history of the Western District 1834-1890. This book, written in 1961, is written by a daughter of the Western District herself, celebrating the white settlement of western Victoria. Its reverence for ‘settlement’ and ancestral pride, without considering the theft of indigenous lands, does not sit well today but it is beautifully written by a young historian who died before it was published. Another historian who discovered Margaret Kiddle’s work was Maggie Mackellar, who used it in writing her own work on Western Districts squatter Niel Black. I haven’t read that work, but I did read Maggie Mackellar’s memoir which led me to….
When it Rains, Maggie’s memoir of packing up after a family tragedy to return to her grandparent’s property in outback New South Wales. She steps into small town life, while continuing to write through her grief, which she expresses as a series of short chapters, acting as a voyeur in her own life, circling around the pain. The isolation of pain and grief leads me to….
Chris Womersley’s Bereft, set during the influenza epidemic of 1919, when Quinn Walker returns from the Western Front of WWI to his childhood home. There is no grand home-coming for him because he had fled his hometown ten years earlier, when he was accused of a rape, and had been reported dead on the front.. Realizing that his mother is very sick with influenza, he approaches the house when his father is absent, and speakers with his mother, who thinks she is hallucinating. The setting of the book during Australia’s influenza epidemic leads me to….
Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and how it changed the world is a global account of the influenza pandemic that reached Australia in 1919. It is well researched and fascinating. She focuses on the disease, its manifestations and the scientific response, but she also interweaves this with a consciousness of how the experience of suffering and recovering from the flu leached out into music and literature in the succeeding decade.
How odd. I seem to have spent quite a bit of time in Australian literature this time, with only my book-end books set internationally.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 
Nice to see The Longing getting a mention… a book that deserved more attention than it received.